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Downsizing Blog

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is the second largest agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The agency cost taxpayers $13 billion in fiscal year 2014, and its budget is growing quickly. Spending has increased 85 percent in the last ten years, after accounting for inflation.

The House of Representatives is set to vote on a continuing resolution (CR) tomorrow to fund the federal government until December 11, 2014. A CR is stop-gap measure often used when the parties and chambers cannot agree on a full-year budget.

Governments tend to spend money on low-value activities because they do not have market signals or customer feedback to guide them. In this report, I examined the problem with respect to the Transportation Security Administration. As one example, TSA’s SPOT program for finding terrorists spends more than $200 million a year with few if any benefits.

Back in February, I highlighted the fight to reauthorize Medicaid expansion under ObamaCare in Arkansas. The states’ plan not only expanded Medicaid; it did so in a more expensive way. Supporters claimed that the concerns were hogwash. Costs would be the same or lower because Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) required “budget neutrality” for the expansion. A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirms that AR’s expansion is a budget-buster.

We have an uncompetitive federal corporate tax rate of 35 percent compared to Canada’s 15 percent. Our Roth IRA is inferior to Canada’s TFSA, as Amity Shlaes and I discussed in the Wall Street Journal. And while Serena Williams still tops rising star Eugenie Bouchard, we should be paying attention to ”What Canada Can Teach Us About Tennis.”

Large government projects often double in cost between when they are first considered and when they are finally completed. This pattern—call it “Edwards’ Law”—is revealed in story after story about highways, airports, computer systems, and other types of government infrastructure.

The Congressional Budget Office today released its periodic update to the federal government’s spending and revenue projections. This report, known in Washington, D.C. circles as the “baseline,” provides a glimpse into the federal government’s addiction to spending. Supporters of uncontrolled spending trumpet that the federal deficit has been cut in half over the last several years, but the real story is lurking below the surface. Washington’s spending addiction is creating an entitlement spending tsunami.

This morning, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its updated Budget and Economic Outlook report, known in Washington, D.C. parlance as the “baseline.” This report details CBO’s projections on federal spending and revenue for this year and into the future.